The World Wide Web has expanded to provide web services faster to consumers. Web services may be provided by a web application which uses one or more services to handle a transaction. The applications may be distributed over several machines, making the topology of the machines that provides the service more difficult to track and monitor.
In some application performance monitoring systems, agents are installed onto Java virtual machines (JVM) at start-up. The agents may be used over and over for a running system, but may become outdated over time. In particular, an interface definition loaded by a JVM for interfacing with an agent may change over time. As a result, older agents become obsolete and no longer function.
There is a need in the art for managing agents for monitoring systems that involve changing interfaces.